There’s A Serial Domestic Terrorist On The Loose, And Black People Are The Targets

The explosions in Austin bore all the hallmarks of a White supremacy extremist.

A series of deadly exploding packages in the Texas capital city have been left at the homes of unwitting Black people over the past 10 days, including two from Monday, according to reports. A teenager was killed and two women injured in two separate explosions in Austin on Monday morning, the Statesman reported.

“Investigators were not ruling out the possibility of the explosions being a hate crime because the victims in those cases are African-American,” Interim Austin Police Chief Brian Manley told the Statesman.

The explosions Monday took place more than a week after a separate package detonated at another city residence on March 2. In that instance, a man initially survived the blast before he was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital the same day.

Manley warned local residents on Monday to stay away from unexpected packages delivered to homes and to call 911 immediately if that happened. Officials were investigating to see if the recent explosions were linked.

The Austin explosions bore all the hallmarks of a White supremacy extremist. “Their methods have included murder, threats, and bombings,”according to the FBI.

“The terrorist threat in the United States is almost entirely homegrown, as no foreign terrorist organization has successfully directed and orchestrated an attack in the United States since 9/11,” Albert Ford, a program associate with the International Security and Fellows programs at New America, told Politifact in August.

While no suspect was immediately identified by law enforcement to the media, it was determined in October that White American men are the biggest domestic terror threats to the U.S. “Since Trump took office, more Americans have been killed by white American men with no connection to Islam than by Muslim terrorists or foreigners,” Vox wrote last year in the wake of the Charlottesville White nationalist violence and the Las Vegas shooting massacre.

That was the case late last year when Kenneth Gleason was charged with murder for the “possibly racially motivated” shootings of two Black men as well as shooting up a home owned by a Black person in Baton Rouge.

A rare exception to that rule came in September when a Black man was charged in the ambush-style murders of two White middle-aged men and was suspected in the apparent serial killings of three others in Kansas City, Missouri.